Joanne and Esther bonding at their significant others’ pickup basketball game in Nobody Wants This seemed like a party to Us, and star Jackie Tohn is sharing what it was like to film.
In the scene, Joanne (Kristen Bell) tries to befriend Esther (Tohn) since they are in relationships with a pair of brothers. The show, created by Erin Foster, hinges on the budding romance between sex podcaster Joanne and unconventional-yet-hot rabbi Noah (Adam Brody) despite family disapproval and religious differences. Noah’s older brother, Sasha (Timothy Simons), is married to Esther, and they share 13-year-old daughter Miriam.
At one point, Joanne agrees to go to Noah’s basketball game with the sole purpose of hanging out with Esther and her mom crew. The outing doesn’t go as planned until Joanne and her sister, Morgan (Justine Lupes), bust out a flask for the women to take shots. According to Tohn, however, the women weren’t actually drinking alcohol during filming.
“No, we would’ve gotten wasted and had huge headaches,” Tohn, 44, exclusively told Us Weekly on Wednesday, October 30. “We were ripping whatever looks like tequila, either water, or also they use iced tea [or] Crystal Light a lot of the time.”
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Tohn, who has been close friends with 44-year-old Bell for two decades, also detailed how she played a character who disliked her true pal.
“She’s so cute; she’s the best. It always makes me giggle when people think that I am the edgy, mouthy one of the two of us,” Tohn told Us. “My personality is not going to be best friends with someone for 20 years who is delicate. She loves a roast, she loves to make fun of me. It’s fun and easy to [work together]. It’s, like, with anything with acting, if you are in a scene with your partner and you have to pretend you don’t like someone. It’s not that hard.”
The onscreen party on the basketball sidelines worked in Joanne and Morgan’s favor as they won over Esther and her friends, which also helped her continued relationship with Noah. Their romance, however, stumbled when Joanne questioned whether she wanted to convert to Judaism for Noah, but the pair worked out their issues by the end of the finale.
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Now that Nobody Wants This has been renewed for season 2, Tohn told Us what she hopes in store for Noah and Joanne.
“I don’t think it’s going to be easy, but I think that they are going to have a relationship,” Tohn theorized on Wednesday. “I think since season 1 is so dreamland, they’re probably going to get into more real relationship-y stuff. I mean, they did do it a little bit with getting the ‘ick’ and her just being like, ‘This can’t work. What are we doing?’ But maybe just more relationship-y things. I mean, we’ll see.”
Foster, whose own marriage to Simon Tikhman inspired the Nobody Wants This script, is currently writing season 2.
“I just think that the stories are going to expand and I leave it to our brilliant writers to tell us where that goes,” Tohn teased. “We’ll see. We love some drama!”
In the meantime, Tohn — just like Us — is obsessing over the entire first season, including Joanne and Noah’s swoonworthy first kiss.
“We did a screening [of the first two episodes] … and we were sliding out of our chairs, Tohn recalled. “I mean, it’s like, ‘Are you kidding me? What is the deal? I don’t even understand.’ KB talks about the face grab and the neck grab, and woo!”
Nobody Wants This is currently streaming on Netflix.
With reporting by Christina Garibaldi
